It’s Hard Out There for an Outsider

Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren told the Boston Globe last week that she wants to win the Senate race so that she can “bring an outsider’s perspective to solving the nation’s problems.” And who better to bring an outsider’s perspective than a Harvard professor, a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion and the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel.

Advertisement

If a law professor who spent 15 years on and off government and quasi-government commissions and whose prescriptions have become policy, and who could raise 7 million dollars in a few months is an outsider, then who exactly is an insider?

When Warren’s Cherokee claims became a little too embarrassing, The New Yorker ran an article asking, “Who is a Native American?” as if the question of who the hell your parents were is some imponderable paradox like “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” or “How much debt can government amass before Washington D.C. becomes a black hole whose gravitational pull will suck in the economies of the entire planet?”

If Warren’s assertion that she is an outsider meets with as much mockery as her assertion that she is a white aborigine, then The New Yorker may run yet another article, “Who is an Outsider?”

Elizabeth Warren’s whole purpose in claiming to be an Indian woman was to claim outsider status. Unlike the other blue-eyed, blond-haired law students, she was an outsider, a member of a proud people who once roamed the plains hunting buffalo and writing corporate liability legislation before they were rounded up and forced to teach law at Harvard U.

Outsider status is prized by insiders. The more of an insider you are, the more outsider flair you need to add to your identity. And no man or woman is better proof of that than the completely unqualified candidate sitting in the White House, who began his national coming out party at the DNC 2004 convention by announcing, “My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack.”

Obama’s outsider biography proved to be as phony as Warren’s Cherokee claims, but it served its purpose, introducing him to the Democratic Party and the country at large as the ultimate outsider. A man whose father grew up in a shack with a bunch of goats, but whose son is, as his future V.P. described him, “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”

Biden was presumably very impressed by Obama’s ability to remain bright and clean after being around goats all day. So was the nation, which did its best to get that nice young man away from all the goats and under a proper roof in the White House.

Obama might have spent as much time around goats as Warren spent around the Cherokee that she claimed to have wanted to meet so badly, but he was determined to remain an outsider. Eight years after the convention, where he declaimed, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” and four years after the election that took him from the tin-roof shack of the United States Senate to the White House, he was still complaining how hard it is to get voters to support someone with his unique outsider biography.

Obama’s books exploring his outsider identity, his speeches tediously summoning up the moonlit night that a dimwitted hippie fell in lust with an abusive Kenyan polygamist to produce a child who would base his entire career on his DNA, and his victimization parade which leaves daily from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to tour MSNBC, CNN and the Washington Post recounting to sympathetic reporters how hard it is out there for an outsider; are the goats and tin-roof shack all over again.

We have spent more time, vicariously, in that tin-roof shack than Obama’s father ever did. We are forced to relive it each time Obama screws up in some grandiose fashion and the media tells us that we want him replaced with someone competent only because we hate outsiders. Suddenly he’s no longer at the golf course or a lavish foreign soiree, but back in the tin-roof shack, complaining that we won’t let him get ahead.

Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
These opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Jewish Press.